Answering machines

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I still have my parents' old cassette-based Phone Mate answering machine from the 80s while mother now has a very modern setup - this Panasonic "digital" thing with cordless phones, tapeless answering machine, etc., Last weekend the power went out in our area for nearly ten hours. My machine of course retained the couple of messages it had stored on its tape (a brand-new Sony C90), whereas mother ended up losing all of hers, including a rather important one of a legal nature.

See, this is why you shouldn't get rid of your analog answering machine, because they don't go down when the power takes a shit!

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One thing I've taken to doing is using a Dialogic program I made to take my calls. One of the great advantages, aside from having a copy of the message you can stick anywhere, is getting real uLaw. Makes it nice for situations where you're at a distant phone, and want to record something unique on three-way. Last I checked, the Panasonic machines used some sort of CELP and some of the cheaper ones go as far as using some sort of vocoderized thing like AMBE. Recently, I've been debating whether I have the time/willpower to turn it into something that does a George routine like in the Evan Doorbell recordings.

Sometimes I'll change it up though, and have my calls go out to a Laser voicemail box. A while ago, I heard on good authority that the system runs on not one, but two Windows 95 machines. Woo cloud!

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Last I checked, the Panasonic machines used some sort of CELP and some of the cheaper ones go as far as using some sort of vocoderized thing like AMBE.

I believe it. The audio quality of that Panasonic when it works generally ranges from low to terrible. It seems to also depend on the quality of the incoming audio. Sometimes you can barely understand incoming messages from GSM fones (not like you could to begin with, hey.)

Recently, I've been debating whether I have the time/willpower to turn it into something that does a George routine like in the Evan Doorbell recordings.

Go for it. If you can get Evan or Pat to do the recordings then all the better. (Actually I guess you already have a set of Evan recordings right there on the tape but maybe he could be persuaded to do a higher quality set for the project. I mean, the Taiganet people reportedly managed to get Dan Chandler to record a custom set of talkovers for their Weather-star 4000 program.)

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Found in a box last saturday alongside NE 117th in Orchards with yet another television set. This one's in better shape than the one I found a couple months ago (same model). I also grabbed another GRE PRO-97 police radio from the box. Gonna discriminator tap it for 900 MHz pager snoo.., um, "digital radio service monitoring". Yeah that's it.